From dopamine rushes to clever design tricks, the psychology behind iGaming is quietly changing how people unwind at their desks. There’s a rhythm to the modern workday. Emails, meetings, deadlines and in between, a quick mental break. For more and more people, that break isn’t about scrolling social media or grabbing coffee. Instead, it means opening a browser tab and slipping into the world of iGaming. What started out as something you found only in physical casinos has changed c...

I've been reflecting a bit on my philosophy of learning stuff. How I like to think about things (and maybe how you like to think about things, if you like to read this newsletter). I make a lot of observations of the form " X is Y " which tend to get understood sometimes as being reductive, and missing important aspects of both concepts. Which is strange to me because I think it seems fairly clear that the intended reading of "X is Y" is "one way, of many, of conceiving of X is that it is an i...

In April 1999, two students at Columbine High School in Colorado killed twelve classmates and a teacher before taking their own lives. Within days, journalists and politicians had identified the cause: both students had played Doom , a first-person shooter released in 1993 in which players navigate corridors shooting demons. Senators introduced legislation, retailers pulled games from shelves, and the attorney Jack Thompson spent years filing lawsuits claiming games were murder simulators and t...

I started working on the new Array data type for Redis in the first days of January. The PR landed the repository only now, so this code was cooked for four months. I worked at the implementation kinda part time (kinda because many weeks were actually full time, sometimes to detach yourself from the keyboard is complicated), and even before LLMs the implementation was likely something I could do in four months. What changed is that in the same time span, I was able to do a lot more. This is the ...

The most influential piece of writing about staff engineers in the last decade has to be Will Larson’s Staff engineer archetypes . He argues that the “staff engineer” title covers at least four very different roles: the team lead, the architect, the solver, and the right hand. This taxonomy gets cited a lot as advice for people who are trying to become effective staff engineers. For both of my promotions to staff engineer, my manager at the time linked me to the “staff engineer archet...

Qiji T1000 quadruped from Dax Robotics, via Reddit . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at chilling effects in the build-to-rent sector, how fast could robot manufacturing scale up, PJM’s new interconnection queue, the backlash against battery storage, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. War in Iran The latest war-r...

Should I do something similar? I don't have an academic journal like they do. I would need to find something that would work for a regular web site. I looked for recommendations for BibTeX, and found several suggestions on stackoverflow : @misc{…} @electronic{…} @internet{…} @online{…} The answers on that page and elsewhere were consistent about using title = {…} author = {…} but inconsistent about year = {…} vs originalyear = {…...

It’s so funny how much a creature like this silly dog can change someone’s life. He certainly change mine, for better or for worse, and he also changed me in the process. Both physically and spiritually. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs It’s so funny how much a creature like this silly...

Another year, another Current—another 5k run/walk for anyone who’d like to join! Did I mostly copy-and-paste this from last year’s post ? You bet I did! Another year, another Current—another 5k run/walk for anyone who’d like to join! Did I mostly copy-and-paste this from last year’s post ? You bet I did! Another year, another Current—another 5k run/walk for anyone who’d like to join! Another year, another Current—another 5k run/walk for anyone who’d l...

Living on light is a dangerous game. Not only do the sun’s rays carry ultraviolet waves that can snap DNA strands and degrade molecules, but they also vary wildly in intensity. Plants must endure and thrive through soft morning light and blazing summer afternoons, through shade one moment and full sun the next. Their solar calories come in a trickle — or a deluge. “Think of a cloud obscuring the… Source Living on light is a dangerous game. Not only do the sun’s rays carry ultraviole...

The Kubernetes iceberg. If I’d have to describe my homelab setup via analogy I guess it would be similar to me on a unicycle carrying plates with both of my hands, or maybe a leaking barrel with water that I try to patch up with silver tape. I’ve also been Kubernetes-curious so I decided to completely redesign my homelab, centered around Kubernetes. It was a bit painful but at least it fulfilled my need for procrastination very well. Overarching goals I’ve got three goals with t...

A while back I decided to stop using Tailwind for new projects and to just write vanilla CSS instead. But one thing I missed about Tailwind was the colour palette ( here as CSS ). If I wanted a light blue I could just use blue-100 and if I didn’t like it maybe try blue-200 or blue-50 . I’m not very good with colours so it makes a big difference to me to have a reasonable colour palette that somebody who is better at colour than me has thought about. But I’m also a little tired o...

Michael Rabin passed away on April 14,2026. I blogged about him  here .  My post listed results of his that proved upper and lower bounds on problems. My point was that he proved upper and lower bounds for MANY different levels- from decidable to regular. And I am sure I left out some of his results.  Here are some things I did not mention. 1) Rabin and Scott shared the Turing Award in 1976.  My not mentioning it raises the following question: If I want to say someone has an impressive set o...

Minimal Viable Zig Error Contexts May 3, 2026 fn process_file (io: Io, path: [] const u8 ) ! void { errdefer log.err( "path={s}" , .{path}); const fd = try Io.Dir.cwd().openFile(io, path, .{}); defer fd.close(io); // ... } Out of the box, Zig provides minimal and sufficient facilities for error handling — strongly-typed error codes . Error reporting is left to the user. Idiomatic solution is to pass a Diagnostics out paramete...

This is a brief and simple [1] explanation of how to adjust the standard sinusoid sin(x) to change its amplitude, frequency and phase shift. More precisely, given the general function: \[s(x)=A\cdot sin(w\cdot x+\theta)\] We’ll see how adjusting the parameters , and affect the shape of s(x) . Each section below covers one of these aspects mathematically, and you can use the demo at the bottom to experiment with the topic visually. Scaling Scaling is conceptually the simples...

Pictured above is the new DeskPi Super4C installed in an 8U mini rack. The Super4C is a 4-node Raspberry Pi CM5 cluster board that solves two pain points I had with the older Super6C . I was testing this board around the same time I helped kick off the SBCC 2026 , the Single Board Cluster Competition for students. A dozen or so university teams squared off to run the best mini HPC cluster with a budget of $6,000, and a couple days to benchmark six HPC workloads . Pictured above is t...

Writing my post on how I use my phone in grayscale yesterday got me thinking about other customisations I make to the computing devices I use. The first one that came to mind is that I keep my laptop, and by extension my external display when I am using it, in night shift mode at all times. According to Apple, night shift mode “adjusts the colours of your display to the warmer end of the spectrum – making the display easier on your eyes.” I have had night shift mode enabled on my lapto...

Language is constantly evolving, particularly in some communities. Not everybody is ready for it at all times. I, for instance, cannot stand that my community is now constantly “cooking” or “cooked”, that people in it are “locked in” or “cracked.” I don’t like it, because the use of the words primarily signals membership of a group rather than one’s individuality. But some of the changes to that language might now be coming from … machines? Or maybe not. I don’t kno...

Graphic: Jatan Mehta | Individual images of the Launch Vehicle Mark III (LVM3) rocket, the two Chandrayaan 4 spacecraft stacks, and the Moon’s south pole: ISRO / NASA / GSFC / Timothy McClanahan / LOLA Announcement before we begin: I’m excited to welcome Catalyx Space  as a returning sponsor of my independent space writing !  🌗 Having  raised $5.4 million  in seed funding, Catalyx is building fully integrated autonomous labs and re-entry capsules for microgravity and in-space m...

Last week I listened to episode 70 of the Complimentary podcast. The hosts, Katie and Anthony, were discussing what they think is easy to design and what’s hard. They discussed: Illustrations Notifications Typography Animation Form design They both seemed to agree that form design is easy. Although Katie did temper that by saying: “Form design could be easy if designers stopped making it so complicated.” She’s got a point. You only have to look at Material Design...

I am a smolweb advocate and, sometimes, I use LLMs. 2026-05-02 19:15 I spend a lot of time thinking about simplicity. Fewer dependencies, lighter pages, tools that do one thing well. So yes, it might look strange that I also spend time talking to large language models. Let me explain where I draw the line, and why I think the contradiction is smaller than it appears. What I avoid I do not use LLMs to generate images, musics or videos. Not because I am against creativity, but because that...

Four of the five steps in every unary RPC handler are wire plumbing. Pin the service function signature and they fit in one generic adapter per transport. Four of the five steps in every unary RPC handler are wire plumbing. Pin the service function signature and they fit in one generic adapter per transport.

I've read a few posts about people leaving GitHub recently, and following my short note to the Fediverse a number of people have piped up saying they're not fans of GitHub, either. From the reading I've done, these frustrations are usually threefold: Microsoft ownership Microsoft training Copilot on open source software Large amounts of downtime In all honesty, none of the factors above really bother me that much. I think that's because I don't rely on GitHub for anything signi...